We investigate the potential for the LISA space-based interferometer to detect the stochastic gravitational wave background produced from different mechanisms during inflation. Focusing on well-motivated scenarios, we study the resulting contributions from particle production during inflation, inflationary spectator fields with varying speed of sound, effective field theories of inflation with specific patterns of symmetry breaking and models leading to the formation of primordial black holes. The projected sensitivities of LISA are used in a model-independent way for various detector designs and configurations. We demonstrate that LISA is able to probe these well-motivated inflationary scenarios beyond the irreducible vacuum tensor modes expected from any inflationary background.

This paper provides a systematic study of supergravity contributions relevant for inflationary model building in Jordan frame supergravity. In this framework, canonical kinetic terms in the Jordan frame result in the separation of the Jordan frame scalar potential into a tree-level term and a supergravity contribution, which is potentially dangerous for sustaining inflation. We show that if the vacuum energy necessary for driving inflation originates dominantly from the F-term of an auxiliary field (i.e. not the inflaton), the supergravity corrections to the Jordan frame scalar potential are generically suppressed. Moreover, these supergravity contributions identically vanish if the superpotential W vanishes along the inflationary trajectory. On the other hand, if the F-term associated with the inflaton dominates the vacuum energy, the supergravity contributions are generically comparable to the globally supersymmetric contributions. In addition, the non-minimal coupling to gravity inherent to Jordan frame supergravity significantly impacts the inflationary model depending on the size and sign of this coupling. We discuss the phenomenology of some representative inflationary models, and point out the relation to the recently much discussed cosmological `attractor’ models.

Hybrid inflation, driven by a Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) D term, is an intriguing inflationary model. In its usual formulation, it however suffers from several shortcomings. These pertain to the origin of the FI mass scale, the stability of scalar fields during inflation, gravitational corrections in supergravity, as well as to the latest constraints from the cosmic microwave background. We demonstrate that these issues can be remedied if D-term inflation is realized in the context of strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories. We suppose that the D term is generated in consequence of dynamical supersymmetry breaking. Moreover, we assume canonical kinetic terms in the Jordan frame as well as an approximate shift symmetry along the inflaton direction. This provides us with a unified picture of D-term inflation and high-scale supersymmetry breaking. The D term may be associated with a gauged U(1)_B-L, so that the end of inflation spontaneously breaks B-L in the visible sector.https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02173